Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
Key jumped back, eyes wide as saucers. “ What was that?”
Sighing , I brought out Bagley’s locket. “ Ms . Bagley .”
Key’s mouth fell open in horror. “ You brought her?”
“ I thought she might prove useful.”
“ But …” Key lowered her voice, as if Bagley wasn’t hanging between us. “ But she’s evil .”
“ Chaotic neutral at best,” Bagley said.
“ I believe in fostering an atmosphere of rehabilitation, not punishment,” I said soothingly.
Bagley harrumphed. “ Then why do I have to suffer your company?”
I shook the locket. “ One good deed, two days.”
“ You said three!”
“ I might change my mind again if you don’t play nice.”
“ Aren’t you scared she might jump onto another item here?” Key asked. She slammed her hands over her mouth, as if suddenly realizing she might’ve given Bagley a great idea.
“ Child , I’m not getting stuck with Dorsey’s guests.” Bagley made a sound of disgust. “ Worthless , the lot of them.”
“ Moving on,” I said, walking to the middle of the room and allowing Bagley a good look at the space. “ See anything suspicious?”
“ I’m a locket, not X -rays.”
“ Don’t make it one day.”
Bagley cackled. “ Might be worth it.”
“ Ms . Bagley , concentrate, please.”
“ Fine . Did you find any herbs?”
I nudged Key . She shook her head. “ No .”
“ Glass vials? Crystals ?”
“ Some amethyst and celestine, but people use those for easier sleep. Could be coincidence.”
“ A spellbook?”
“ Nothing that looks like one.”
“ Then there you go. Nothing suspicious. Youth these days—completely useless.”
Choosing not to rise to the bait, I stayed silent and stomped my way into the bathroom. Key followed, looking torn between laughing and being horrified.
The bathroom counter was filled to the brim with makeup, tools, and creams. Empty toiletry bags were stacked inside the bath towels basket, and a peek into the drawers showed different unlabeled bottles.
“ Now we’re talking,” I murmured, picking a bottle and bringing it against the overhead light. The liquid inside was thick and light brown. It didn’t scream potion, but if I were a dark witch, I would try to disguise my spells.
“ You think this is it?” Key asked, picking another of the small bottles.
“ Maybe .”
“ Better test it out on yourself to make sure,” Bagley suggested in her sweet grandmotherly voice.
Key put the glass down with great alacrity.
“ Don’t scare Key ,” I said. “ She can put you in a hole deeper than anything I can dig up. Unless you want to make friends with dinosaur bones?”
“ They might be more interesting than you.”
Rehabilitation , Hope , not punishment. Inhaling deeply, I produced a bright smile. “ Let’s check for magic first.”
Key nodded, edging farther toward the exit of the bathroom.
“ If you want to be a bounty hunter,” I told her, not unkindly, “you better get used to dealing with people like Bagley .”
“ Ms . Bagley .”
“ Plenty of evil spawns out there,” I added.
Key bit her lip, then approached again.
“ Now , where were we?” I mused.
“ Nowhere near finding if this is a potion.”
Fighting the urge to yeet Bagley out the window, I took off one glove and awakened my magic. Checking if there was magic inside the bottle was the fastest way to know what we were dealing with.
Detect .
My power threaded through my veins, down my arm, pooling in my fingerprints and testing the glass and the contents beyond. There was no reaction, so I moved onto the next bottle.
Detect .
A faint trace of magic bounced back from the glass, and I put it on the counter. “ This one has some magic.”
Key oohed in a very ego-bolstering way, and I tested the next three bottles. Two were normal, but the third resonated with magic as well. When I put the normal bottles back, I saw a small pouch shoved into the back of the drawer. One good sniff told me it contained a mix of herbs.
This was promising.
“ How can we tell if it’s dark magic?” Key asked.
“ Ms . Bagley ?”
“ You got a blood test kit?”
No , but that was an excellent suggestion. So good, I was tempted to extend her out-of-locker time to a whole four days. “ I can find one.”
“ Maybe tonight?” Key asked, hopeful. “ We can come back and test.”
“ Maybe .” Sonia kept a few blood tests in her car, but who else might have? Maybe Hutton ? But Hutton would probably not help until I told him what was happening, and I didn’t want to get Brett , Key , and Shane into shifter trouble.
My phone vibrated with an incoming call, and I checked it to see it was Dru .
“ It’s Dru ,” I told Key before answering. “ Yes ?”
“ We have a problem with one of our suspects,” Dru said quietly.
“ What happened?”
“ Lydia Lee is dead.”
I gasped.
Key leaned in. “ What is it?”
“ Lydia Lee is dead,” I repeated.
Key gasped. “ Dead ? How ?”
“ Dead ? How ?” I parroted into the phone.
“ Someone found her unresponsive in her trailer.”
“ Are the police there?”
“ No , the paramedics were just here. They say it looks like a massive heart attack.”
“ Heart attack,” I repeated for Key .
The question was, natural or magic-induced?
“ Do you think it’s related to the sabotage?” I asked. “ Did you check for magic?”
“ Not yet. Ethan is losing his mind. He keeps swearing he didn’t do it.”
“ Do you think he did?”
“ I didn’t do it,” claimed Ethan’s distant voice. “ I swear!”
“ He’s been around us most of the evening,” Dru said in irritation. “ We’ll check for magic after things have calmed down.”
I relayed the information to Key , then said, “ Let me know as soon as you know something.”
“ I will.”
I returned the phone to my pocket.
“ What do we do now?” Key whispered.
“ I …” My brain seemed to be working in slow motion as it digested the news.
“ If it were me,” Bagley said dryly, “ I wouldn’t want to stand around in a dead person’s room.”
Key and I stared at each other in horror. Then I shoved the bottles back into the drawer, and we both bolted for the door, barely managing not to bump into each other and get stuck in the doorway.
“ My good deed here is done,” was the last thing Bagley said before I shoved her under my jacket.
We slipped outside and didn’t stop until we were a couple of blocks away.
“ What does it mean?” Key asked, panting as if we’d ran a marathon rather than an awkward fast-walking sprint. “ The death.”
“ It means either Lee had worse health than she thought, that she messed up her latest attempt at sabotage, or the real UNSUB planned her death as some sort of big finale.”
Because what could be a bigger finisher for a curse than murder? Even Bagley hadn’t come up with anything better.
“ That’s a lot of options,” Key said, worrying her lower lip.
“ Unfortunately .”
My phone vibrated with another incoming call from Dru .
“ They’re shutting down production for today,” she said.
“ Let’s meet up,” I said, thinking fast. We agreed on a spot and a time, and I relayed the plan to Key .
Twenty minutes later, we sat at a fast-food restaurant and secured enough space for everyone. The workers gave us the evil eye, but nobody bothered us. About forty minutes after that, Shane , Dru , and Ethan made their appearance.
“ So ,” I began, “this is awkward.”
“ It wasn’t me,” Ethan said. He looked near tears.
“ Mm -hmm,” I said.
“ It wasn’t!” He pointed at Dru . “ I was near her all evening.”
Dru nodded reluctantly. “ He was.”
And from the sounds of it, a bit of a pest. I studied Ethan , but his obvious nerves could be attributed to the anxiety of getting caught as much as the fear of being blamed.
“ Did anyone have eyes on the trailer?” I asked.
They all shook their heads. “ The trailers are set up away from the houses we were using for the scenes.”
Ah , yes, the great chase scene where Lily discovered the murder victim’s business associate was actually part of an occult cult that had been planning on sacrificing victims for their spells.
Fiction and reality, not so different sometimes.
“ Who found her?” Key asked.
“ I think her assistant?” Shane scratched the back of his head, then repositioned his eye patch. “ We didn’t realize until there was a commotion and they called for the paramedics.”
“ What about our remaining main suspects? Sanders and Curtis ? Where were they?”
Shane scrunched his nose with displeasure. “ They were overseeing the crew getting the scene ready for filming.”
It was, indeed, quite sad when suspects refused to be caught standing with a knife over the bodies. At least Hannah had had the grace to be found next to Crane’s corpse.
“ If they used a potion in her drink or food, they wouldn’t have to be nearby for it to work,” I said. “ Perfect alibi.”
“ Maybe it really was just a heart attack,” Ethan said, hopeful. “ Maybe it has nothing to do with the sabotage.”
Dru let out a sound of disbelief. “ And pigs fly.”
“ It’s true,” Ethan insisted. “ Coincidences do happen!”
“ It fits the pattern, though,” I said. “ First some small incidents”— I pierced him with a stern glare—“which were your doing. Then it escalated into harming the crew.”
“ It wasn’t?—”
Dru slurped her drink noisily, and Ethan scowled at her.
“ We know, dude,” Shane cut in dryly.
“ Then Brett ended up in the hospital…” A new thought occurred to me, one that gripped my heart in an icy vise. “ What if whoever poisoned Brett meant to kill him?”
Dru put her drink down. “ You said there wasn’t much magic on his cup. If it was a potion strong enough to induce heart attacks, you would’ve known.”
I exhaled in pure relief. She was right.
“ We found two magic potions in Lee’s room,” Key said in a low tone.
“ What were they?” Ethan asked, suddenly engaged.
“ We had to leave before we could test.” I almost expected Bagley to comment on the missed opportunity by not taking the bottles with us, but she remained silent. She’d been silent since we’d left the bed and breakfast. Hedging her bets? Ethan wasn’t exactly the kind of paranormal you’d want to know about your secret existence, even to mess with them. “ By the way, do you guys have any blood testing kit?”
They all stared at me oddly except for Key , who ate a fry, then grimaced because they were about thirty minutes cold.
“ It’ll help to figure out if potions have blood in them,” I explained.
Understanding dawned on their faces.
“ Maybe Alex knows someone who sells them?” I asked Shane .
“ Do you want a kit that actually works?” he asked back, not missing a beat.
“ I have full faith in Alex’s friends.” Okay , so some of the Halloween lights hadn’t exactly worked as expected, but Bee - Bee was fine! One out of two wasn’t a bad average. Although since this involved detecting dark magic potions, Shane might have a point in that a two out of two would be more desirable.
“ I’m leaving tonight,” Ethan blurted.
We all turned to him.
“ To where?” I asked.
He rubbed his palms on his thighs, clearly distressed. “ Anywhere ! I’m renting a car and getting out of here.”
“ Why ?” Key asked blankly. “ Won’t they fire you when they resume filming?”
“ I don’t care! I’m not going to stand around while the police get involved.”
“ Skipping town isn’t going to make you look any less guilty,” Dru remarked.
“ But it wasn’t me, and they’re going to think it was me!”
“ The only reason we think it’s you is because you called the boss here,” Shane said wryly.
Ethan swallowed hard and pinned me with woeful eyes. “ Are you going to tell them?”
As much as I loathed breaking witch-client confidentiality, I would have to if it turned out Lee had been murdered by paranormal means. As innocent as Ethan appeared, he could be fooling all of us. And if he was innocent, he was the only point of contact with the second witch. A witch who might be a murderer now.
He must’ve read my thoughts on my face, because he hung his head in despair. “ I’m done for. I’m going to prison.” He slumped over the table, and Key moved his tray out of the way just in time. “ I’m going to bounty hunter prison. They’re going to torture me and starve me and leave me to rot.”
I patted his back. “ There , there. Nobody’s going to bounty hunter prison.”
“ He will if he’s guilty,” Dru murmured unhelpfully.
“ But you’re not guilty, right?” I asked with an encouraging smile.
Ethan turned his head to plead with me. “ I’m not guilty.”
“ See ? Nothing to worry about. The truth always wins.”
Except on all those true crime documentaries about wrongful convictions, but it probably wasn’t the time to bring that up.
“ You really think so?” he asked, hopeful again.
“ I do. All you have to do is tell the truth.”
“ You’re going to tell Officer Brooks ?” Key asked. She sounded disappointed, but to her credit, she didn’t appear ready to argue. That was good—a great bounty hunter knew when to involve help.
Probably .
“ I’ll call her tonight.”
Key still looked reluctant, but she let out an “ All right.”
“ What do we do now?” Shane asked. He reached over, squeezed her hand, then crossed his arms again.
Key sent him a small smile then addressed the rest of us. “ We’ll wait to see what Officer Brooks has to say. I don’t want to get in her way.”
We all nodded in understanding. Even Ethan , although I wondered if he was still planning how to be two states away by morning.
“ Sounds good.” I stood up. “ We should all get a good night’s sleep and reconvene tomorrow morning. I’ll let you know what Officer Brooks wants to do.”
They all agreed, and we went our separate ways. The night was young and Old Olmeda’s partying in full swing, but it didn’t help dispel the sense of gloom clinging to my heart.
Our best suspect was dead.
There was a good chance the death had been intentional.
And I hadn’t been able to prevent it.
What a failure.